Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [162]
Why should the rich, especially in countries like ours where they now glory in injustice and inequality, bother about anyone except themselves? What political penalties do they need to fear if they allow welfare to erode and the protection of those who need it to atrophy? This is the chief effect of the disappearance of even a very bad socialist region from the globe. 9
Ten years after the end of the USSR, it is possible that fear has returned. The rich and the governments whom they have convinced of their indispensability may once again discover that the poor require concessions rather than contempt. But, thanks to the weakening of the fabric of social democracy and the disintegration of communism, the danger today comes from the enemies of reason: religious and ethno-tribal fundamentalists, xenophobes, among them the heirs of fascism or parties inspired by fascism, who sit in the governments of India, Israel and Italy. It is one of the many ironies of history that, after half a century of anti-communist Cold War, the only enemies of the Washington government who have actually killed its citizens on the territory of the USA are its own ultra-right zealots and fundamentalist Sunni Muslim militants once deliberately financed by the ‘free world’ against the Soviets. The world may yet regret that, faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s alternative of socialism or barbarism, it decided against socialism.
17
Among the Historians
What has happened to the writing of history in my lifetime? Readers not interested in this somewhat specialized subject may skip this chapter, although it is unfortunately not as academic as it seems at first sight. There is no getting away from the past, i.e. from those who record, interpret, argue about and construct it. Our everyday lives, the states we live in, the governments we live under, are surrounded by, drenched in, the products of my profession. What goes into school textbooks and politicians’ speeches about the past, the material for writers of fiction, makers of TV programmes and videos, comes ultimately from historians. What is more, most historians, including all good ones, know that in investigating the past, even the remote past, they are also thinking and expressing opinions in terms of and about the present and its concerns. Understanding history is as important for citizens as for experts, and Britain is lucky in having a powerful tradition of serious but accessible writing by experts for a wider public: Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Charles Darwin, Maynard Keynes. Historians should not write only for other historians.
In my generation what Marc Bloch called ‘the trade of the historian’ was not taught in any systematic way in Britain. We picked it up as best we could. Very much depended on whom we encountered as undergraduate students. In my days at Cambridge there was only one teacher whose lectures, though given at nine o’clock in the morning, I attended regularly, in common with most of the bright young radical history students of that time.1 The astonishing M. M. (‘Mounia’) Postan, recently arrived in Cambridge from the London School of Economics, was a red-haired man who looked like a lively ape or Neanderthal survivor, which did not stand in the way of his impressive appeal to women, and he lectured in a heavy Russian accent on economic history. Economic history was the only branch of the subject then on the Cambridge programme which was relevant to the interests of Marxists, but the Postan lectures, with their air of intellectual revivalism, attracted even some such as the young Arthur M. Schlesinger who made no bones about his ‘lack of skill (and interest) in economic history’, not to mention his lack of interest in Marxism. Every one of those lectures – intellectual-rhetorical dramas in which a historical thesis was first expounded, then utterly dismantled and finally replaced by Postan’s own version – was a holiday from interwar British insularity, of which the Cambridge history faculty provided